JSFTemplating, JavaServer Faces, Ajax, GlassFish, etc.

Woodstock is here!

Sun has delivered some great components as part of Sun Java Studio Creator and NetBeans Visual Web Pack. But if you don't use one of those products, you probably didn't know it. Well, now you don't have to use these tools to enjoy the rich JavaServer Faces components they provide. In fact not only are they available outside these products, they are now Open Source!

Project Woodstock is the Java.net project which contains the source code for these components. Both Creator's and NB VWP components were derived from earlier versions of this code base. The code is released under the very flexible CDDL license. These components have been in the making for over 2 years and have gone through several development cycles. They're stable, full featured, and work seemlessly together sharing a common theme -- they're ready for production!

Let's take a look at what some of these components look like:

The CommonTasks component produces a page of common tasks for your application, complete with drop-down help and nice roll-over visual effects:

This Table component can create simple to very complicated tables. It takes advantage of the unique "DataProvider" feature that makes managing your data efficient and a breeze! Below is a fairly complicated table:

The Masthead component allows you to present a visual appealing and very functional masthead complete with status information, buttons, branding, and more:

The Wizard component allows you to create web-based wizards for walking your user through a process:

The Tree component provides a both a server-side and client-side rendering option and nice visual appeal:

The PropertySheet and FileChooser shown below are two more nifty components that provides a nice page layout and the ability to browse and select a file on the server:

All of these components are "themed" so you can adapt the look of these components to your company's look and feel by creating your own theme. Many of the components use Ajax (via Ed Burn's Dynamic Faces project), and more Ajax features are sure to come. The TLD document and example application included in the project provide more than enough information to get you started.

If you're a Faclets user, Jason Lee is already working on creating a Facelets taglib for Woodstock. And of course if you're a JSFTemplating user, I have full support for the Woodstock components built in... plus I have a simple example app on the site to get you started. Plus, the entire GlassFish admin console (source here) is built using JSFTemplating and Woodstock components. So whatever your JSF environment (NetBeans, Facelets, JSFTemplating), you'll be able to use these components.

So what are you waiting for? Go download the components and try them out!

Jason Lee has completed the Facelets taglib for the components. He's working through the process of checking them in / making them available. You might consider checking with Jason directly, you can post a message on his blog (I heard he's going to write a blog on this topic this weeekend): http://blogs.steeplesoft.com/ . Or you can find him on IRC at irc.freenode.net ##jsf during the week.

Thanks very much for this info.
I managed to get his patches from the woodstock site , get the cvs version, apply the patches and woohaa the 24kb woodstock.taglib.xml gets generated!
=> Now the testing begins...
THX a lot!
CU Mike